So, you want to be an architect?

nobody ever asked me yes or no questions i never get a yes or no questions it always starts off with let me tell you when i was five years old this is what happened yeah and i get like a novella that just sets him up for the question which is then what do i do for the rest of my life you know and i was like i don't know you that well that's right it's a lot of pressure you're putting on me this is gold right here what i'm about to give you you know i was kind of brought up that it's it's rude to ask people what they make right so uh i i normally don't i say you know what i i do really well you know i i can pay all my bills i live in a nice house i send my daughter to an expensive private school because that's what matters to me her education i get to take like one really nice vacation a year but the irony is i'm not driven by money what i have or what i've been able to accomplish partly is because my wife works right we're a dual income family and we have one child i caution people on the optics of looking at someone else as a measuring stick for if you should be happy or not so i try to tell people the amount of money you make is relative to what you need to live a happy life right part of what i get paid is is in dollars part of it is in fulfillment like i enjoy what i do it brings me happiness we work to pay bills but i also work to find fulfillment mentally and how i might give back to my community and how i feel like when i leave this planet did i leave something behind that was of value did i contribute to society as a member these are all things that my norwegian father and i'm sure his norwegian father distilled into him that it's not always about you it's like what are you doing to help others sure yeah and and and now i i view that as part of my compensation which is a big reason why i never had the opinion if i went and did x i could make more money because i go well i wouldn't be as happy doing that and so only part of me is being fulfilled and i used to tell this story about um i'd quit a job and i'd gone to work for another place that paid me like i got paid 24 dollars a year that was my starting salary i'm not far behind you i mean i i graduated right just a few years after you and that was my first job starting salary and yeah it wasn't it wasn't great and you know and i look at what the average is now and i go god i don't think i passed that until you know like 10 years ago i mean it was it was crazy yeah and so but so i took this job and my salary went from 27 000 to 38. and that was a pretty big percentage jump and i went there and i lasted four months in that job i hated every bit of it yeah i mean i'm assuming that your options aren't live under a bridge in a box versus this job that there's nuances to the salary we're talking about but i go if you're looking at taking a job that's like a 10 or 15 change in your salary and and you don't think that you will be fulfilled in other ways other than monetarily in this new job i wouldn't do it yeah what you get paid is really kind of a market demand situation so if you're fantastic and you're really gifted and like you're like oh my gosh i'm getting to hire you know eric to do my house i'm going to pay a premium because i want that guy instead of i just need a roof to keep water out right that you're going to make more money than someone who is a say a volume provider if your skill set's not like super amazing and let's say that you're a guy that rolls out jack-in-the-boxes right you can still do really well right you just it has it has to do with where do you find your happiness and and you can slide that scale between happiness and salary and project type and it's going to be this weird matrix of like i could do jack-in-the-box roll-outs and be miserable but i make a lot of money or i can do you know closet renovations not make a lot of money and be super happy but yeah i mean it's all over the place [Music] there's this myth sort of floating around and it i think keeps a lot of people away from the profession so do i need to be good at math to become an architect like what's the math competency what's required just to get into school for example but then also like what's the day-to-day interaction with math so i people ask me this question all the time and i even asked other architects i go what's the answer the answer is no you don't have to be good at math the math that i do now is essentially the math i learned in fifth grade right it's all addition subtraction multiplication division hardest math you will ever do will be in college and then once you're done with that it's like a thing of the past yeah you know because the reality is is like insurance companies won't let us do the math that we did in college right we have to get an engineer to sign off on that kind of map right so so what i tell people is that if you want to be an architect your skill level at math should not be the thing that keeps you from achieving that goal like get a tutor if you need to you know take a summer school class to make it work whatever i didn't ever take trig never took trick can you imagine going through college level engineering classes and i didn't i didn't know how sine cosine i didn't know any of these things so i got a tutor and i just powered my way through it and you know i got through it for me it was more of a higher level understanding in those structures classes like if you think about a wall here and a wall here and there's a beam that's you know spanning between them a roof rafter right that's a simple beam as opposed to say a gable structure where you have a ridge beam you know and those things to me um really start to inform how you design and think about architecture um and so it's the conceptual framework that you can then build the design around you know i don't do any math i hire an engineer to do that because i don't actually find that fun at all but there are some basic things that yeah you need to know that you cut a hole in this side of a beam uh versus the center of a beam you know there's that's a different thing i go head-to-head with structural engineers all the time on how to solve problems so i will say this is what i want to do and i understand the concept of how it works and then once i get to conceptually like i go i want this i want that this is going to do this we're going to hang this down i'll let them go run the math and tell me that my cable needs to be you know a half inch versus 3 8 of an inch but i'm the one that decided there was going to be a cable in the first place yeah right so it so structure now has manifested itself as a design component in my process the actual calculation of the math doesn't figure into it for me yeah i spend more time budgeting running budget numbers and dealing with those things than i ever would like i'm not even interested in sizing a beam like it's just not interesting to me i mean people my friends do it you know most people around here practice residential work and so you know rather than hire engineer they'll do a framing plan themselves and that's totally fine and completely reasonable until the geometries of the buildings get strange and awkward and you have all kinds of wind loads that mean you have sheer well like it's not interesting to me so i work with somebody and we have a process for working together that makes a better building and i think that is yeah you can do that with almost anything in this field except for people ask about drawing and sketching do i have to be good at drawing and sketching to be in this field and that is something that i have a pretty strong opinion on and i'm anxious to hear yours the unpopular answer is no you don't have to be good at sketching to go into this field i can just look around my office and the number of people who are good at sketching and go clearly you do not have to be good at sketching but i can tell you there's a lot of positive things that come out of sketching the brain to hand connection is without interface right so when you take a pencil or pen and you move across the paper there are no controls that you need to have mastery over in order to make your hand move the way you want it to move there's it's a perfect interface right here's the value of doing sketching regardless of how you do it i think one it puts you in the room live right so if you're a young person you're a designer and you're in a room with a client and you have rolled drawings and you can take a pen to a piece of paper and draw what they're talking about or make a change in real time in front of them it makes a connection between you and the client and that project so much stronger than when you say well i got some ideas let me work on them and i'll email them to you later i mean it takes you out of the time it takes you out of the moment and i think there's some real advantages to being you don't have to draw great you just have to draw well enough to communicate what you're thinking you know most of what this profession is from a skill set standpoint is about visually communicating your ideas right i mean that's what a set of drawings does to the contractor you have to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas to your client i mean you built a model for your home renovation for your life right because you had to communicate those ideas to somebody and there's lots of ways to do that you and i were in school at very similar points and i was doing a lot of physical model making you know making using chipboard and cardboard and of course that has probably all changed now i would guess but i think there is a feedback loop that happens between your hand and a pen and a piece of trace and the ability to create something without boundary you know if you can't create a barrel vault in revit or whatever program you've chosen to use you're not going to be designing with barrel vaults right but it's pretty darn easy to create on you know a piece of paper and there is a feedback loop that happens that makes the design better i it's it's one of the fundamental skills that i think can be studied and improved and like you said you don't have to be what you might consider to be a great architectural renderer if you absolutely hate drawing if it's not something you enjoy man i i have a hard time seeing how someone participates in this field well i think that's a hard line to draw one i don't disagree with just about everything you said except for one thing there are people that are in this profession that are not they don't want to be designers they don't they don't need to draw to to find a place and contribute in our profession now if they're listening to you right now they probably either are or consider themselves or want to be a designer so your comment makes perfect sense and i go yes exactly right if you want to be a designer you need to learn how to communicate you know in real time with with with a drawing apparatus and a piece of paper or something like that if you want to be if you're going life is to be a project manager you know that may not be a skill set that you need sure [Music] do people need a degree to be an architect do they need to have a degree to participate in the field like what's your answer to that legally yes nowadays you have to have a college education and you have to either have like i have a professional degree i have a five-year professional degree or you end up having either a 4-2 right so you get that master's degree or you have a degree in an unrelated field like a say you know romantic languages of the 18th century for four years then you're gonna have to go get a three-year right you know master's degree in order to put you on the track where you can eventually get licensed and call yourself an architect so technically yes you have to go to architecture school to be an architect do you have to be a graduate of an architectural program to practice design and do kind of some of the things we do you know uh tadao ondo didn't go to architecture school so that's the one that everybody is very quick to point out right and i go all right you're not him right like you shouldn't expect that like of all the people in the world you and him are on the same level like so my dad used to tell me this all the time you don't go to college to learn how to do something that's what trade school is you go to college to learn how to learn your ability to take in a lot of information and process it and spit out a result that is not necessarily just the sum of all the parts that went into it is what makes you i think a creative problem solver so my wife got her undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics right and i got my degrees in in architecture and it turns out this is a real thing i thought i made it up so i'm still going to take credit for it even though there's actually some like real papers out there i used to say architecture radial thinkers like there's a problem in the middle and we can approach it from the entire thing and as we push in and we kind of compress down towards the middle sometimes we push here and something kicks out over here so there's not one right answer it's just how do we find this right balance as we compress towards the solution okay i thought you were going to say lateral thinking because i always thought of that you know you have to solve all the problems all at once you know it doesn't yeah yeah similar but it's the same kind of concept right like you've taken this and you've just kind of flattened it out so linear thinkers which is what my wife is they have the ability they go like step one step two step three step four step five and step five is the result of some combination of the previous steps right and what happens is they need to do that because if they go off and something doesn't work they need to retrace their steps so they can go back on a new path again without restarting that's not how architecture works [Music] there's plenty of people that i hear from that say gosh i really have this interest in interior renovations or fit outs or you know i have a real knack for additions or whatever it might be you know do i need to go to school for that and i think you know to your point you know going to college is about learning to learn you also understand that there's theory and history and all the other you know materiality and tectonics and all the things that inform what we think of as good architecture right there's this volume of information that you're missing out on if you're not participating in that does that mean that all that needs to happen in an interior renovation or a fit out or something probably not right i mean it would be crazy to think so but um what i always say to people who ask those questions is that if you're looking in the sort of shelter magazines at these beautiful homes probably the majority of those were designed by architects and so the people who have two three million dollars four million dollars to spend on a home that's going to end up in a shelter mag like that they're going to hire an architect that gets back to the comparison when you go and there's going to be exceptions to all the rules so if somebody hears this and they're going to like they're going to be the one person that's going to go that's not true i understand that this isn't an absolute but i will say that those folks who don't have that education that are doing it i i go they're solving problems right and we need that i don't have i'm not threatened by people who didn't go to architecture school and aren't licensed and they're taking jobs i'm not worried about that right i have more power to you but i go you're getting hired because somebody needs something done or you're providing a service which is not unlike licensed architects but i think that there's an experience that goes and i don't mean like experience i've been doing this for years i mean there's like a like an experience that the clients have that is this kind of journey of why things are the way they are rather than is it not going to leak and i need five bedrooms with four en-suite bathrooms and it's not just checking the box it's it's the let's find a reason for why these things can be what they are so that when they have their house at the end of it it's way more than a sum of its parts because there's stories behind everything yeah and i and i go that's what makes the difference i think the people that do these really nice projects and they're really expensive and they have big budgets as opposed to the people that do like this volume production work there's no narrative to the production work right i have time the client's not really involved or it's just they just want it's a commodity i you know i need to put a i want to take my garage and turn into a bonus room right there's no story to that because you're solving a problem that is a trade that's a trade school solution but if somebody says hey i've got this piece of dirt and it's on this site and you know and you're like the sun is coming in from here and the wind's blowing that and in 1812 this happened and we're going to do a nod to history because right that's that's part of what the fun of designing a project should be for both the architect and for the client yeah that's what clients are buying they're buying not only a process but they're buying your process and it's pretty expensive so it might as well be fun and it might as well be interesting and i think that is the thing that i think you discover in architecture school what is a process what's your process how do you learn from the processes of other people and you know that's part of internship and the whole path to licensure so i think it happens at various points along the way and to just sort of skip that circumnavigate it is fine but you're missing a lot and and that's what i try and propose to people and i think there's plenty of people who also come to me and you know in their 40s or whatever and say is it too late to go to architecture school oh all the time and all the time and i i tell them i go one it's never too late to chase a dream i don't care what the dream is right if this if this is something that's important to you and you're willing to do what it takes which fill in the blank if you want to be a nurse if you want to be a lawyer if you want to be a whatever it is and it requires you to kind of shut your life down to go in a new path to explore to follow that dream do it i mean i would never tell somebody that no that ship has sailed you're stuck with the mediocrity of your life and some bad decision that you're only now realizing 15 years later ridiculous right go chase your dream and i said because one of two things is going to happen either you're going to start that journey and realize it's not for you but you'll never wonder what if right that's done right and you can go on to going back and go well now i appreciate what i had before a little bit better maybe that's a positive outcome but answering the what if is also a really big deal but the other possibilities you might go i can't believe i waited this long to do this because i love it so much and this is so rewarding for me and here's the challenge that people have if you're 45 years old i'm making a 50 it doesn't matter if you're if you're not the normal age of someone who's in school when you graduate you're going to go get a job that 25 26 year olds have right and you're going to be surrounded by people that could be half your age and the challenges that i see sometimes with people who go back to this process at a later age is they feel a little disconnected from their peer group because their peer group is at a different stage in their life yeah right yeah they're talking about dates and buying their first house and stuff and you're not thinking about those things yeah and yeah i mean younger people talk about stuff that older people just don't have an interest in so they're like hey we're going to go out and do shots after work you want to come no i don't you know there's that sort of disconnect but i haven't seen anybody ever go down that path and come out the other side and go this was a mistake because i don't have my shots group with me all right i don't fit into that group because you know what you're old enough where you have other friends like you've figured that bit of your life out it's just not a problem so if we talk about you're in high school and you're going to you're going to go to college you want to go to architect school and you're wondering what kind of classes should i be taking now and i tell them that whatever you architecture program you go to they're going to teach you what you need to know right so it's not like you need to already come in day one as a even a semi polished i know what's going on you don't right that's what college is going to do for you a skill set that you will need and it will serve you for your entire life and you can start on it right now this is gold right here what i'm about to give you is what good architects have the ability to do is to articulate why they do or do not like something right and that may sound really silly but i mean if you just ask the random person do you like that and they'll say no when you go wide and you go i don't know it's just you know i don't know i just don't like it you can't do that if you're an architect you say well the proportions are right and the way the sun is coming in from the east is casting a light and this would not make for i mean being able to understand why you do or don't like something allows you to break it down so that you can recreate successes without duplicating solutions right like you design one space and it's amazing that's not the only amazing space you're capable of designing if you understand why it's amazing yeah right great advice yeah and people can do that you can start doing that when you're a kid is to be able to understand why you do or don't like something but the important part is you have to articulate it yeah you have to be able to say this is what it is as i give people recommendations um i love photography so maybe this is where it's grounded but you know if you photograph something and it it forces you to really observe it and see it for what it is the same holds true for sketching and i think that that's another way of sort of speaking to the same principles that you're talking about why is something the way it is and um how did how did it get that way and what's it made of and all those things and i think you know those sort of meta skills that you can develop are really the most beneficial because i think plenty of people start architecture school and don't go on to finish it because they realize it's just not for me right and so if you haven't built some set of skills that apply to a broad range of different fields you're kind of missing out you know so for me meta skills are things like photography things like writing like i think you can't go wrong learning graphics composition things like that you know public speaking think about think about how much public speaking you're doing as an architect you know writing as communication tool and like you said you're going to show up to architecture school and you don't need to know architectural history or theory like you're going to learn that you're going to learn how to use the softwares that you need to know and you're going to learn about how to put a building together hopefully um it's not those things that are the real value it's this the skills that allow you to sort of express your ideas uh and and that can apply to almost any field probably in if you choose to not go on and become an architect you know photography is going to a skill set that's going to serve you well in many different fields visual communication you know being able to put together a presentation it's going to serve you in almost any field you can go into but the other thing that photography forces you to do is get out in the world and see buildings i mean i i think traveling that's the other thing that i always recommend to people like if you have an interest a passing interest in architecture go travel and go see buildings because you know if that stuff's not interesting you in real life in the flesh like there's no point yeah really i mean that is alright find out pretty quick if you don't if you can't just walk down the street and go i like that right then you might go maybe this isn't for me but maybe it is maybe you're that person who ends up being a specification writer or maybe the person that does construction administration there's if someone thinks that they want to be an architect you know i tell them like depending on their age obviously it's different but i go if you're still in school and you're thinking i go go audit a class go sit in it go go audit architecture history class right and i go it's important that i go the reason why it's important to do like a history class is because those have stories behind them things that will help you associate the visuals of what you're looking at with why that might matter the really good buildings all have stories behind them yeah and your ability to understand that story really has to do with how closely you're paying attention and how much you actually want to like learn the story or figure it out or just walk it and see like any big building right now so much like so many people worked on putting that project together there's all these stories in there that you can figure out just by looking at it so cool why'd they do what they did [Music] do you have books that you send to people like if you had to give somebody who said i'm interested in architecture what would you what would you gift them honestly tom kendick books are the ones that everybody seems to respond to i mean that guy single-handedly destroyed the architectural book market i mean i'm pretty sure that he accounts for 90 of all architectural book sales so it's kind of the amuse boosh right i mean it's like they're easy to look at the beautiful photography people can just look at it not know what they're looking at it but can go that looks pretty nice my sister's boyfriend uh wanted to talk architecture so i got him a couple books just to say look here you go just you can look at them and if you want to look at these pictures and go what's happening here we sat down and we kind of flipped through and he got a kick out of it those are not necessarily the same books i would point to somebody if they had more than just like a passing interest in architecture there might be some other books so the truth is is those books changed for me with regularity and i actually finally set up a list that you can find on my website that is this revolving ongoing list of books that i put in there like if you have an interest in say mid-century modern i go hey you know the case studies book that's a really amazing it's like because you get all the stories all the photographs it's got drawings that's one of the things that's kind of a big deal for me all the books that i really like the architectural books they have to include drawings in them yeah they can't just be pretty pictures well the kundik books are like the latest book has no drawings in it there's no process the great thing about his first monograph was there was process like i'm always flipping to the back of his books because they always throw some of his sketches in and they're getting smaller and smaller now they're like the literal size of a thumbnail for me when i visited architecture schools back in the late 80s and i was shopping for a good one to go to i went to the college bookstores and i bought all of frank ching's stuff because i loved his writing style it had all the buildings in it it had all the i mean he's drawing pencils he's like here's the here's the gear that you needed he does a hand drawing with a pencil holder and stuff and i totally geek out on that um and i always refer people to his stuff because there's almost something for everybody in there and it's a real lyrical beautiful hand-drawn style that is i think disappearing but i just love it i also point people toward who have were serious about getting into architecture peter zumthor's thinking architecture book which i don't know if you've read that but he talks about the sort of you know the poetics of space in in the experiential aspect of it and i think that's a dimension a lot of people don't think about but his work is just it's monumental to me i think it's just it's it's the best of the best when you show people the best of the best people just see architecture in a different way those are the things that um i put push to people and say if you're into architecture man it doesn't get better than this well you know the thing about the the kundig books is i go like the early ones are what sucked people like me in and they've his market has grown beyond the field of architecture and they the and i don't mean this as a reduction at all because quite honestly i would love if he and i were like buddies but that they they become coffee table books they're they're beautiful for the sake of just being beautiful it's not about process and understanding and learning it they're not meant for people like you and me anymore sure right like we can still look at them and appreciate them but we don't appreciate them the same way that we did the earlier ones now like my sister's boyfriend he can appreciate these ones because he doesn't he can't read drawings process doesn't mean anything to him yeah so the kundal books have moved along the zoom thor stuff is really interesting because you know he's famous for being slow mike however long you think you should take it's going to take a lot longer for him to do it and he just kind of says hey your building is the best argument for why it takes a long time right that's it there's no like long-winded story he's like there's the evidence right there and i go i work in are you ready to go from there yeah where do we go from there yeah you've got the zoom thor beard going on man i like it it's good yeah i grew this beard actually a couple years ago i'm amazed i haven't so my wife is super anti-facial hair oh she's like she does she does not like facial hair and uh and what was funny so one christmas break couple years ago uh i just didn't shave for a while and it kind of came in and i guess because i tell people because i'm norwegian i can grow like a viking beard really fast so i mean my beard is pretty thick yeah it is it would get pretty big and so but i was going to a a show the international builder show and i was one of the panels i was asked to sit on was to talk about um skilled labor shortage in the united states right like where are the trim carpenters where the like the skilled laborers we have it's a problem so they asked me to sit on this panel oh god it was me it was me and every member of the this old house tv show and i was like why am i on this panel right like they have all the star power they could ever want yeah and these were the closest thing i had to heroes growing up yeah right like i didn't get cable like cable wasn't a thing until like in my neighborhood until i was like a junior pbs yeah pbs so watching this old house was the closest i thought if i want to be an architect i have to watch this show like this is like this is the closest thing i can get to see like what i'm gonna do for the rest of my life and so i'm sitting on this panel and i'm like i'm i'm not only am i star struck i'm like i don't wanna embarrass myself because these are the people that i looked up to so i go i'm not going to see them with my my christmas beard are you kidding me so i shaved it off right that was always the plan shaved off and my wife for the first time in my life she goes oh i can't i'm a little sad you shaved the beard and i went i went what why and she goes it hides this man oh that hurt a little bit look i got holes in the wall

Channel: 30X40 Design Workshop

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Keywords: architecture, architecture school, architecture students, 30x40, 30x40 design workshop, lifeofanarchitect, bob borson, math for architecture, math for architects, architecture career, career in architecture, career in architecture and interior design, career in architect, career in architecture salary, how much do architects make, architect salary, is architecture a good career, architect math, becoming an architect without a degree, becoming an architect at 40

Id: N4qBnhGJnhA

Length: 31min 2sec (1862 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020